Connected Business Planning for Police
Police Forces across the UK battle daily to reduce crime rates and the fear of crime, whilst facing relentless pressure to continually adapt to the changing nature of criminality and rising citizen expectations. The Policing Vision 2025, jointly published by the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and National Police Chiefs’ Council, seeks to transform the delivery of Police Services, through technology enabled business change and data driven decision making. It highlights the need to “develop the flexibility, capability and inclusivity required to adapt to change”, be “agile and outward focused” and develop “a professional workforce equipped with the skills and capabilities necessary for policing in 2025.”
For policing to be as efficient and effective as possible, Police Forces need to make sure that the right digital tools are in place to support officers in doing some of the most demanding work anyone is called upon to do.
To focus on one key area, there are many common challenges and limitations when it comes to planning:
- Disconnected processes across departments can create siloed, short-term and reactive planning practices, leading to a lack of ownership by key decision makers.
- Lack of access to information and reporting insight can reduce understanding of future resource gaps, investment areas and risk.
- Slow and repetitive manual tasks can take away time from the workforce to focus on more value-added work.
Technology must play an important role in overcoming these challenges, a view echoed in the National Policing Digital Strategy 2020 - 2030 which speaks of enabling officers through digital methods to allow the workforce to focus on critical and value-adding activities.
For instance, Oracle works with Police Forces and public sector organisations across the UK to standardise business processes, manage and sort through large amounts of data, and introduce automated tools to support the workforce at every step. Oracle Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) brings together the disparate business planning processes (across Finance, Procurement, HR, IT and Operations); to create a single end-to-end approach to planning. The single platform approach drives standardisation, through a unified data model, embedded automation, predictive analytics powered by machine learning and greater accessibility to more insightful information.
Utilising these capabilities, Police Forces are better able to:
- Conduct efficient and effective ‘What If’ analysis and driver-based scenario planning, generating insight from multiple data streams, focusing planning effort on priority areas, better preparing to manage risk and consequences.
- Ensure relevant functional teams own the underlying baseline data for their parts of the plan creating a single version of the truth, increasing collaboration between teams and promoting budget ownership.
- Develop a robust performance management framework that effectively measures performance against the organisation’s delivery outcomes and other key performance metrics (e.g. Value for Money; Diversity & Inclusion; Environmental, Social, and Governance).
To learn more about how Oracle is helping public sector organisations transform business planning processes, please get in touch.
Author:
Alexander McNeill (Oracle – Finance Strategy and Transformation Director – UK Public Sector)
Georgie Morgan
Georgie joined techUK as the Justice and Emergency Services (JES) Programme Manager in March 2020, then becoming Head of Programme in January 2022.